Pullinger's collaboratively authored digital story elaborates a child's dystopian experience in a technological world, where her mobile tablet-like prosthetic friend "Brad" is a warmer companion than the absent father and the preoccupied mother. The narrative develops through minimalistic description, augmented with sound and image animations
Textual Elements/ Digital Affordances
Readers advance the story; relentless linearity, but the possibility of returning and navigating once the piece is complete.
Typography, visuals, and overall "ambience" are highly produced, gesturing towards cinematic immersion in another world.
Visuals create an animated GIF-like effect, not full blown video; appropriate given the narrative frame of "data" captured by Alice with her "player" (mobile device).
Temporality is controlled, linear ("This piece takes approximately 8 minutes to view." ) emphasis added.
Brief "how-to" screen and simple click interaction makes navigation trivial.
Reader interventions pace the forward progress (expection: the flower photographing scene, where you seem to need to capture each in order to advance; a simple game).
Analysis/Interpretation
The simplicity of the language fits both the purported age of the narrator and the quasi-pedagogical aims of this piece, which imagine an audience of developing reader and NOT an audience of graduate students or cosmopolitan sophisticates. Employs traditional narrative devices of suspense and indirection, as the crisis of the missing father and the journey ensue. Readers are intrigued by the story and by the campy collage elements while also feeling empathy for this 8-year old girl, Alice, living in some post-national future. We don't see Alice except as mediated through her screen; in a sense, her screen is our screen (we see her type on her "player" etc.) The simplicity of language and predictable narrative are deepened by the growing anxiety in the narrator, the sense of her isolated life ("Things I would do if we lived in a town: Ride a bike..." ) and flickering poetic elements (the literal flicker of images, and profound or polyvalent observations like "The sky hums up here, I don't know why, as if it's electronic.") While almost a children's story, it nonetheless uses a technological situation (loss of signal, loss of power, global capitalism's need to develop energy resources) and the frame of the child's imaginative interface with her device ("I hear Brad whisper") to explore the contemporary situation.
Overview
Pullinger's collaboratively authored digital story elaborates a child's dystopian experience in a technological world, where her mobile tablet-like prosthetic friend "Brad" is a warmer companion than the absent father and the preoccupied mother. The narrative develops through minimalistic description, augmented with sound and image animationsTextual Elements/ Digital Affordances
Analysis/Interpretation
The simplicity of the language fits both the purported age of the narrator and the quasi-pedagogical aims of this piece, which imagine an audience of developing reader and NOT an audience of graduate students or cosmopolitan sophisticates. Employs traditional narrative devices of suspense and indirection, as the crisis of the missing father and the journey ensue. Readers are intrigued by the story and by the campy collage elements while also feeling empathy for this 8-year old girl, Alice, living in some post-national future. We don't see Alice except as mediated through her screen; in a sense, her screen is our screen (we see her type on her "player" etc.) The simplicity of language and predictable narrative are deepened by the growing anxiety in the narrator, the sense of her isolated life ("Things I would do if we lived in a town: Ride a bike..." ) and flickering poetic elements (the literal flicker of images, and profound or polyvalent observations like "The sky hums up here, I don't know why, as if it's electronic.") While almost a children's story, it nonetheless uses a technological situation (loss of signal, loss of power, global capitalism's need to develop energy resources) and the frame of the child's imaginative interface with her device ("I hear Brad whisper") to explore the contemporary situation.